posted April 13, 201211:46 AM
Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group (NSG). Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).

What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them?

Describe what you worked on.

Set goals for next week.

Did you learn something during this week?

Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).

Writing on a novel

Characterization

World Building

Relevant research

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Last Week's Goals

Nothing this week. Been lazy and resting.

My goals for next week:

World Building

Scene Segment Consolidation

Get back on the writing train and do some world building.

What did I learn this week?

I have not learned anything specific this week (finally recovering from the LONG week last week). However, I have been keeping track of some things lately (trying to anyway). The publishing industry is changing rapidly. If you've read practically any article about publishing lately you've heard that. In fact, it could be considered a large understatement, particularly with this week's news.

The American Department of Justice (DoJ) has filed a lawsuit against Apple and several of the largest publishers over the agency model. I follow several people / companies in the publishing industry ranging from authors to publishers and editors to agents. Many of these I follow will point out an article on the Internet they found interesting. Normally I can read all of the articles suggested from any given day. However, that is not the case this week.

Many articles have been written regarding the DoJ's decision to file this lawsuit. I won't opine how I feel about that here because with so much information being thrown at us at the moment (much of it speculation or personal opinion) that it will take time and serious thought to come to a conclusion. If you have not done so yourself, I highly recommend you do some research on this topic.

The changes in the publishing industry will affect each of us differently. I invite everyone to take a look at these articles and study them. However, be wary of accepting one opinion over another without thorough research. Find out why these people have the opinion they do. Some people will hate Amazon and their article will be written toward that bias. Others will hate the "Big Six" and slant their article another way. One-sided articles become soapboxes that only stir up arguments, not discussions. For example, a couple of the articles I bookmarked were re-tweeted by a literary agent, who claimed these were excellent articles. Your opinion of agents will determine how much you agree with such articles. One of the articles I bookmarked is entitled something like "Everything you need to know about the DoJ lawsuit in a single post." Really? I list below the number of groups and people who will be affected by this decision. This article claims to cover how this decision affects all of these groups in an objective way? I have not read that article yet, but I'm skeptical of their claims.

Readers

Authors

Publishers who settled

Publishers who did not settle

Online book retailers (e.g. Amazon)

Big box booksellers (e.g. Barnes & Noble)

Independent booksellers

Book distributors

Self-Publishers

Self-Service Publishing Companies (e.g. Smashwords)

This is an important event for us to study. We cannot simply read an article or two and just nod our heads.